Gadgetory

if Portia stands for performance and SUV stands for piggy where does hybrid fit in there well I guess we'll find out as we drive to 2011 Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid and check the ten the Cayenne is the cash cow at Porsche outselling its second bestseller the Panamera by double that means volume and that means important regulatory gains can be had by offering your volume leader as a hybrid you see you didn't need to ask for this car for it to be made now inside a Cayenne hybrid looks just like inside of a Cayenne non-hybrid in fact I'm not even a detail the cabin tech and such go see our video on the 2011 Cayenne S the non hybrid it's the same load of tech optional and standard you can find that it's C net TV just type in 2011 Cayenne when you get there now Porsche has now gone to an 8-speed automatic on their Cayennes it comes all the way back in your normal fashion goes over to the side for a gait forward for an upshift back for a down you've also got these metallized paddle thingies on the wheel here on the screen this will show your hybrid energy flow so what combination of power is going to the wheels and what's your battery state now down here behind our traditional suspension settings which again a Cayenne S would have without a hybrid is the e power button when you press E power it puts the car in a mode to bias toward running on electric and of course deplete the battery more so you can drive this guy for a few miles depending on how you get into it as an electric vehicle you see here on the main tachometer right in front of your classic Porsche stuff the big gauges the tach you've got something new here a ready range this car has auto start/stop not just when you're stopped at a light but also when you're driving and don't need motive powers you can go down the highway in this guy and the tach will rather unsettlingly drop down to dead that's because it's freewheeling the motor there's a clutch that will let the engine get disconnected and then turn itself off now when you move a Cayenne around as a hybrid you change a lot of things not just slap an electric motor on there if I lift this cover off you can see we've got a blower here there's the tail tail pulley going into that housing supercharger on the top into this relatively small 3 liter v6 as opposed to the standard Cayennes big bore v8 now all in this guy develops 380 horsepower 428 foot-pounds of torque big numbers from a fairly small engine gets this guy zero to 60 in 6.1 seconds this is no lightweight vehicle while delivering 2024 mpg through that one choice only 8-speed Tiptronic automatic but note this 47 of those horsepower and 221 foot-pounds of that torque come from the electric motor which is down the stream a little bit and there's a clutch between this engine and the electric motor and transmission that allow it to be pretty much divorced from the drivetrain when that's the greenest way to run let the vehicle totally freewheel without any drag losses off the engine and do start/stop in a very ambitious way that's part of the formula to get pretty good mpg considering now interestingly Porsche did not put a hybrid badge on the back of the car that's where most people see what's in front of them anyway I'm kind of surprised by that just those small ones up on the side but there's other stuff in the back of this car that does tell you it's a hybrid back here in the cargo bay load flat floor pick this guy up and well well well look at that that is not a spare tire folks that's one big ol honkin nickel metal hydride battery as it says right there now because that's there the spare tire isn't there isn't one in this car pretty sure a Cayenne S says either a mini spare or full sized right there instead you get this little concession for the modern world this little tool kit with a little ranch and stuff like that but the real giveaway is this Porsche rind infliction diction middle other words tire goop when you get a flat tire you're ingloriously hunkered down on the side of the road squirting this stuff in there hoping it holds no spare you've also got a little very cool little porsche air pump right here to put the air back in once the goop's in there that's a big difference from a standard Cayenne s now because they got all this stuff back here the battery the sealant the spare pump and all that you have a little less cargo space 3.2 cubic feet less cargo space in the back of a hybrid it's not obvious but it's subtle that's kind of the size of one small to medium suitcase that you're not going to fit in here okay underway the Cayenne is shall we say complicated think about it now you've got a v6 engine which is underpowered for this car in its displacement but then you've got a supercharger that takes it well into the healthy range but the supercharger can be in boost or not depending where you are the accelerator curve that all goes to an electric motor which can be in or out there's brake regeneration when you get on the brakes depending on how hard you get on them you've got a clutch that can separate the engine from the rest of the drivetrain depending whether you're freewheeling and the whole thing will auto start-stop whether you come to a stop or sometimes when you're driving it high speeds and all of that equation gets pumped out through an 8-speed automatic that does a bit of thinking now if that doesn't sound complicated to you you don't know what complicated is and this car does drive complicatedly it's transitions and its overall everyday driving are just kind of bulky and clunky and back and forth not egregiously so you know it's an expensive car but it's just doing too much transitioning on the open road when you're really getting into it that's fine it doesn't have those issues but around town every day commute I found it to be kind of a tiring mess of sensations and transitions that I got tired of time for the bottom line let's put the cayenne s up against the Cayenne S Hybrid average mpg 18 for the S 21 for the hybrid so you pick up three miles per gallon average zero to sixty five point six versus six point one the hybrids half a second slower curve weight the hybrids 385 pounds heavier cargo space the hybrid holds 3.2 cubic feet less greenhouse gases here's a surprise the hybrids a little dirtier spare tire well no and the price you're paying four thousand dollars more for a Cayenne S hybrid so if you drive 15,000 miles a year and pay 450 a gallon for gas you can earn back the hybrid premium in seven and a half years so as you can tell I've got my doubts whether a Cayenne Hybrid makes sense in your life or mine but for the manufacturer Porsche it definitely does because of the increasingly tight standards for emission and fuel economy in the European market and in the US they need vehicles like this in their mix because these guys sell hand over fist to make them a little bit more efficient helps their average numbers to get to what the government requires and that frees up Porsche to sell more sports cars that do what they do unabashedly